The Monster is in the house. I haven’t actually laid a finger on it, but I’ve been introduced.
It is currently being fed with special monster baby food — heavy windows, slow drivers, stuff like that — it is pacified with shiny plastic discs and drip-fed digits from far-distant lands.
At a hundred-billion-tera-flops a gargle-second, it’s learning fast. A lot seems to be going on.
In the meantime, sorry for the silence. I’ve been working as fast as I could on a tiny coaster-sized array of pixels with unfamiliar software, no mouse, and no ability to load up pictures to my usual storage site, or read my usual emails (except one at a time with 14 keystrokes of complexity and a 20 second wait for the next – I gave up). I dream of graphs I can’t make. I reboot the old machine, and sometimes feel normal for a half hour. Then it goes.
Space-time is being warped in my head. Things I used to do in five minutes take me all day.
Some futurists have waffled on prophesizing about the coming integration of hominid brains and silicon chips, blah-de-blah. I always thought they were bonkers. But I was wrong. My computer was already a part of my brain. I can’t think straight without it.
There was a system failure in my IQ.
To all the people who chipped in and dug deep… Thanks for rescuing me!
Soon, soon, I’ll get that monster on my desk.
And I am so looking forward to it…
; D
PS: The technical details (because I know some readers like these things) direct from the engineer:
The new computer is an i7 with a 240 GB SSD (Intel 520 series), a 1TB HDD, and a video card big enough to run Joanne’s two 30 inch screens. Have loaded Windows 7 Ultimate (sorry, but Windows 8 gets too many bad reports) and anti virus, and got on line to update drivers and operating system, so far.
Currently transferring data from the back up drive in her old computer to her new computer. All the computers in this house have two drives, using one for basically everything and one solely for backup. Hard drives are like light bulbs, failure is a matter of when rather than if. To back up we use SyncToy, a free application the Microsoft techies built for themselves to use–and unlike most Microsoft software, the interface is almost Apple-like in simplicity. We use the Windows Task Scheduler to run SyncToy once a day to synchronize (effectively back up) all the documents and data in places like My Documents and AppData\Roaming.
The main drive on Joanne’s old machine had become flaky, failing to even boot after it gets a little hot (btw, a good way to get a few extra minutes or hours from a dying drive is to put it in the freezer for an hour or two, then use it). But the backup drive in that computer seems fine so we shouldn’t lose much (anything?). Pulled that backup HDD out and put it in the new machine, temporarily in place of the 1TB HDD (just replug the cables from one drive to the other).
Endless applications to go on, including Microsoft Office, IE10, Firefox, Filezilla, Thunderbird, Notepad++, Adobe Reader. Should have her back on-line sometime tomorrow.
Joanne’s old machine was used very solidly for five and a half years, from October 2007, covering her entire blogging career. The rest of it seems ok. I’ll load a new operating system (Win 7 Pro); some small people we know have been clamoring for a computer.